Chicago's Food & Drink Fifty 2014

#49
Giuseppe “Joe” Quercia
Pizza maker
Joe Quercia’s been working at Freddy’s Pizzeria since he was a boy. He marched right up to the owner of the deli and asked him for a job cleaning up around the place. “I told him if he didn’t like how I worked he didn’t have to pay me,” Quercia recalls. Forty-six years after he first pushed a broom across the floor, he’s still manning the team that cranks out some of the best homemade pasta, gnocchi, lemon chicken, pizza and gelato this side of Salerno. Don’t miss the gelato con brioche, made by sandwiching homemade gelato between two slices of fluffy brioche bread—and sealing everything up in a special gelato brioche press.